BUFFALO, N.Y. – Most consumers who are shopping for a new
car depend on good crash safety ratings as an indicator of how well
the car will perform in a crash. But a new University at
Buffalo study of crashes involving cars and sport utility vehicles
(SUVs) has found those crash ratings are a lot less relevant than
vehicle type.

The study is being presented May 16 at the annual meeting of the
Society of Academic Emergency Medicine in Atlanta.

In head-on collisions between passenger cars and SUVs, the UB
researchers found that drivers in passenger cars were nearly 10
times more likely to die if the SUV involved had a better crash
rating. Drivers of passenger cars were more than four times more
likely to die even if the passenger car had a better crash rating
than the SUV.

“When two vehicles are involved in a crash, the
overwhelming majority of fatalities occur in the smaller and
lighter of the two vehicles,” says Dietrich Jehle, MD, UB
professor of emergency medicine at Erie County Medical Center and
first author.

“But even when the two vehicles are of similar weights,
outcomes are still better in the SUVs,” he says,
“because in frontal crashes, SUVs tend to ride over shorter
passenger vehicles, due to bumper mismatch, crushing the occupant
of the passenger car.”

When crash ratings were not considered, the odds of death for
drivers in passenger cars were more than seven times higher than
SUV drivers in all head-on crashes. In crashes involving two
passenger cars, a lower car safety rating was associated with a
1.28 times higher risk of death for the driver and a driver was
1.22 times more likely to die in a head-on crash for each point
lower in the crash rating.

The UB researchers conducted the retrospective study on severe
head-on motor vehicle crashes in the Fatality Analysis Reporting
System (FARS) database between 1995 and 2010. The database includes
all motor vehicle crashes that resulted in a death within 30 days
and includes 83,521 vehicles involved in head-on crashes.

“Along with price and fuel efficiency, car safety ratings
are one of the things that consumers rely on when shopping for an
automobile,” says Jehle. These ratings, from one to five
stars, are based on data from frontal, side barrier and side pole
crashes that compare vehicles of similar type, size and weight. The
one to five star safety rating system was created in 1978 by the
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Jehle notes that after manufacturers addressed the roll-over
problem with SUVs that plagued these vehicles in the 1980s and
1990s, rollover crashes are now much less common in SUVs.

“Currently, the larger SUVs are some of the safest cars on
the roadways with fewer rollovers and outstanding outcomes in
frontal crashes with passenger vehicles,” he says.

Jehle says that prior studies on frontal crashes have found that
compared to passenger cars with a 5-star crash rating, cars with a
rating from one to four stars have a 7-36% increase in driver death
rates.

“Passenger vehicles with excellent safety ratings may
provide a false degree of confidence to the buyer regarding the
relative safety of these vehicles as demonstrated by our
findings,” says Jehle. “Consumers should take into
consideration the increased safety of SUVs in head-on crashes with
passenger vehicles when purchasing a car.”

Co-authors with Jehle, all from UB, are: Albert Arslan and
Chirag Doshi, MD candidates in the School of Medicine and
Biomedical Sciences; Joseph Consiglio, data
manager/statistician for the UB Department of Emergency Medicine
and a graduate student in the Department of Biostatistics in the
School of Public Health and Health Professions; Juliana Wilson DO,
a post-doctoral scholar in the Department of Emergency Medicine and
Christine DeSanno DO, a resident in the UB Department of Emergency
Medicine.

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